Quickly enough I was a convert, Sparrow said, to this very new way of doing and talking about philosophy. To the man himself. I was at his feet, I was hanging upon his words, I was half-consciously adopting his quirky personal mannerisms, copying him, mesmerized and terrified by him, as were a dozen others my age and older, with my share of wits and considerably better. His personal intensity, the force of his presence let alone his intelligence, Wittgenstein’s, were simply startling, Sparrow said. Electric is the only word I can use. A cliché, I suppose, but there you are. All of his students and colleagues have said roughly the same thing. His electrified presence. The Alumnus’ correspondent was getting it all on his little pad or else he had brought a recorder, Kessler thinks; this was what he had come for. These recollections were what made Claude Sparrow, class of ’35, newsworthy. Then after I had been attending his lectures just two terms, Sparrow said—after I had gotten to know him a bit, spending hours during the week on walks with him across Midsummer Common and along the river, talking about whatever he fancied to talk about and struggling just like a young bride to make him good company, listening mostly, going with him often to the cowboy films he loved so well—when I was under his sway utterly, Wittgenstein announced that he planned to leave Cambridge. For a year at least, possibly more. Needed to do some serious thinking, was the way he put it, typically. As though all his brain-spraining efforts there at Trinity were just casual daydreaming; as though all those electrified lectures were just chat. He had to think seriously now, for a while. So he was going to Norway, to live in a hut he had built with his own hands, on the coast above Stavanger. Later I would envision him there, in his mud hut—or his whatever sort of hut. Eating raw chickens he’d killed with his teeth, perhaps. And thinking. I couldn’t tag along to Norway of course, Sparrow said. So I did what I felt was the next best thing. I left Cambridge and went to Vienna, from which Wittgenstein had originally come. It’s fashionable now to say that one can’t understand Wittgenstein’s work without understanding late Hapsburg Vienna, the cultural milieu in which his sensibility and his moral concerns were shaped, Sparrow said. Maybe that’s right. I don’t really think many people—not more than a handful in the world, I mean—understand his work anyway. With or without the Vienna context. Certainly I don’t claim to. But back then in ’36 I hit on the very same notion, intuitively, you see. I’ll take some credit on that account. Wittgenstein was hiding out in Norway so I went looking for him, for his meaning, in Vienna.
Eating raw chickens he’d killed with his teeth: Kessler enjoys imagining a hesitation, when that phrase fell, in the earnest note-taking of the philosophy major.
It was the start of his life’s third great passion, Sparrow claimed. His passion for the city of Vienna. And this one outlasted the others, long surviving his delusions that he could ever write decent poetry, or make so much as a spear carrier’s contribution to the modern revolution in philosophy—surviving even his infatuation with Wittgenstein the person. Vienna became an important character for him, very much like a person herself. Vienna was the older mistress, gently initiating the young man into certain purpled mysteries, letting him cash his energy and his innocence for a little pleasure and wisdom, at steep but not unfair rates of exchange; the older mistress to whom the young man will later sometime return, loyally, nostalgically, condescendingly. I myself returned after the war and then again in the early 1950s, Sparrow said. Both times under very different circumstances than during that first enchanted stay, when I was young and moon-eyed. That first stay, I spent most of my time in cafés. Demel’s was too fine for me then, but I had a regular table at the Sperl. Where I met my few Viennese friends and did my reading—philosophy and German newspapers and Ezra Pound—and consumed enough dark wonderful coffee to rot out my guts permanently, if it hadn’t been for the magic immunity of youth. I lived with a middle-class family in their apartment just off the Lassallestrasse. The father was a businessman whom I addressed unfailingly as Herr Direktor for the fifteen months I spent under his roof. Having come to him with a reference from Wittgenstein, whose family name was eminent in the city, I was treated always with reciprocal respect, even when it became clear that I was just a philosophy-drunk American layabout. My room at the family’s place was a deep cave in back, dark but perfectly satisfactory to me, furnished with a wooden table and a chair and a cot and a languishing aspidistra planted in a chamber pot. To which decor I added a life-size bronze stork, acquired from a painter friend who was leaving town, Sparrow said. After quoting this outpouring for its color value, the Alumnus’ correspondent begins circling his material back. Too soon, damn it, for Kessler’s wants. No, I didn’t find the meaning of Wittgenstein in Vienna, not on this stay or later, Sparrow is quoted. I found everything but that. What did you find? is the question hollered in Kessler’s brain, but the Alumnus doesn’t bother to ask. Yes, I left and went back to Cambridge in early ’38, just before Hitler’s triumphal welcome by the Viennese. We practically passed at the city limits, he and I. Very glad I missed that occasion, actually, Sparrow said. Yes, Wittgenstein was back in England also. Get out, he told me. Find something useful to do. By then I was capable of hearing him, so I returned to the States, and to another stint of graduate school. Kessler frowns, frustrated. The profile is winding down to a finish. The philosophy major has been writing about an unexceptional man, a microbiologist and government drone, who once knew the great Wittgenstein. Kessler on the other hand wants to hear about Claude Sparrow in Vienna. He suddenly has a strong feeling about Claude Sparrow in Vienna.
“I was there briefly after the war,” Sparrow told the Alumnus. “Then eventually I went over again, in 1952, and stayed on until the joint occupation ended in ’55. I was attached as a consultant to the Allied Council, more or less, advising them on technical matters of waste-water management and hygiene. The city’s utilities had been very badly damaged. And there was a cholera scare, several years earlier.”
Kessler shakes his head. The cholera scare is one of those nice allegorical touches, presumably. He can imagine for himself what sort of work Claude Sparrow was really doing in Vienna, if in fact he was there at all; still, extrapolation goes only so far and Kessler would like to know more. But by 1952, as even Kessler happens to be aware, Ludwig Wittgenstein was dead. Thank you very much, Mr. Sparrow, and Kessler can hear the philosophy major slapping his pad closed.
Thanks a million, Mr. Sparrow. And we’ll forward a copy of this story, when it runs, to your office at the National Institutes of Health.
For the second time this morning Kessler waddles out to use the pay phone on the wall halfway between the bar and the lobby. He could use his room phone upstairs, of course, but the very thought of that climb makes his stomach lift like a boat deck and besides there is no need for any great amount of privacy. He is only trying to reach Barry, who again does not answer at home, and again also does not answer at his office at Georgetown.
This time Kessler lets the second call ring on until a switchboard receptionist returns, stating the obvious impatiently: Professor Koontz does not seem to be in his office, sir. Kessler asks whether Barry has been in at all yet today. She doesn’t know, says the receptionist, implying also by her tone that if there might be any way for her to find out she is determined not to discover it. What she does is ring extensions. Kessler leaves the simple message that he has been calling and will call again. There is still more than an hour before Kessler needs to leave the hotel. Maybe it will reach Barry, the message, maybe not. Maybe Barry’s odd immunity to alcohol last night did not apply to the hangover phase, and he is resting in darkness under a cold washcloth right now, with the telephone unplugged, as Kessler himself would very much like to be. Three hours after having gotten himself vertical, notwithstanding the fluids, Kessler only feels worse. He shuffles back to his table. His coffee cup has been scooped away, a hint of overstayed welcome, and it’s necessary to ignore the hint and order another. Nothing wants to go right today.
>
He continues reading.
The article Barry saved from the New York Times Magazine is titled “Digging After the Mole.” It ran in the issue for May 8, 1977, flanked by the usual complement of imperious underwear ads.
It was written by P. J. Bainton—only a name to Kessler, though a vaguely familiar one. Over the past four or five years Kessler has noticed a handful of CIA stories under the by-line of this P. J. Bainton, mainly in Harper’s or the Atlantic, possibly one also in Esquire if his memory is correct, all of which looked to be very much the same sort of piece Kessler himself used to write. And none of which he bothered to read. Now he finds that P. J. Bainton has preceded him on the trail toward Dmitri. That might be a good thing, for Kessler’s purposes, or possibly not.
In January of 1963 a Russian defector arrived in Washington bearing a very strange message, the Bainton story begins. Kessler pauses. He can imagine himself writing exactly the same sentence. This defector will be Fedorenko, Bogdan Kirilovich. The message is Dmitri. Kessler sits forward and allows himself one sip of coffee, his professional antennae all fully deployed. He hopes half-consciously that P. J. Bainton will prove to be helpful but not too helpful; besides curiosity and of course the quest for justice and truth, there is some sense of competition involved. He would not like to discover at this point that the article for which he has been stretching his neck, squandering his time and his peace of mind, has already been written. Then he remembers the tableau at Biaggio’s grocery and feels, shamelessly, a caress of relief. Never mind the competition. This is a breaking story and Pokorny’s murder is one thing at least that cannot very well be redundant. The defector was Bogdan Fedorenko, a KGB officer who had been on assignment to Paris. Fedorenko had thrown himself into American hands just a week earlier. The message he carried, according to P. J. Bainton, was that a Soviet mole had penetrated high up within the Central Intelligence Agency.
Yes, thanks, Kessler knows that much himself. The question of the moment is: how high did P. J. Bainton penetrate? Was it high enough to discover Dmitri’s identity?
No. Kessler reads quickly to the end of the article. He skims across those parts that match his own information (Fedorenko’s initial uncooperativeness, the meeting with Robert Kennedy that opened him up, the big announcement about a mole, the reaction of controlled hysteria at Langley, the arrival of Viktor Tronko to make matters even more confused, the ensuing upheaval and schism, McAtee and the Tronkovians versus Sparrow and the Fedorenkovites), giving closer attention to the rest but rushing ahead impatiently toward the answer to that pressing question. The answer is no: Bainton did not solve the big mystery. Dmitri was not unmasked—not in this magazine piece, anyway. The title turns out to be nicely precise, in that P. J. Bainton was writing as much about the process of chasing Dmitri—Claude Sparrow’s ten years of relentless spadework, digging after the mole—as about Dmitri himself. Digging after, as distinct from digging up. Kessler is pleased by Bainton’s failure, though he realizes that that is foolish and petty, and can sympathize with the frustrations. He wants Dmitri for himself. He wants his own fair chance with the shovel. You want a hernia or a cave-in is what you want, dimhead. Nevertheless Kessler feels another touch of relief when the Bainton story ends inconclusively, with just a last wild fillip of accusation, rather than anything solid.
Finally, some evidence in Agency hands suggests that Dmitri, all along, was positioned within the Counterintelligence section itself, a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse, according to Bainton. A dozen years later, with Claude Sparrow now in forced retirement, the rumor even persists that . . . et cetera. Kessler recognizes these symptoms. Months of research had yielded a great junk pile of disconnected facts and intriguing suppositions, but no pattern, no single well-supported hypothesis, yet eventually it all had to be shaped into some sort of story. Deadlines had been set. Space had been allotted, investments of time and cash made. Poor P. J. Bainton must have been desperate, turning to lame formulations like “some evidence suggests” and “the rumor even persists.” Kessler has been in the same miserable spot. He knows the panic, the code phrases that serve for self-extrication, the feeling that vultures are circling over your typewriter, drawn there by the smell of dead writing and dead hopes.
He goes back at once to comb the piece more thoroughly. What he is looking for now are new names, new details, new fragments, new possibilities—or any versions of reality that do not match with what he has already been told. Of this type of minor discovery there are several.
One concerns Sparrow’s return to Vienna in the 1950s. Forget waste-water management, forget microbiology. Bainton confirms what Kessler suspected: Sparrow went back to that city for the CIA. In fact, according to Bainton, by 1952 he was the chief of station. And though Sparrow was already then on the rise, Vienna made all the difference to his career, as Bainton tells it. Sparrow’s three years there at the end of the joint occupation were something of a triumphal march, evidently, which transformed him from just another bright young field officer, one among many, into a minor legend. The Vienna station under Sparrow became the Agency’s best channel of intelligence from eastern Europe. Its productivity—both the number of agents recruited and the consistent quality of their information—surpassed even the larger base up in Berlin. More important, Sparrow himself received almost sole credit for detecting and foiling two major KGB gambits, two nearly successful penetrations of Western services—one of those against the British, one against his own shop. In the first case, he helped the Brits blast open their Soviet cell and salvage what they could in publicity. In the second, Sparrow personally turned back an agent who had been doubling against one of his officers, and that agent eventually furnished dossiers on half the KGB personnel in occupied Austria. These two coups, according to Bainton, gave a new order of momentum to Claude Sparrow’s career. In 1955 he was called back to Washington and anointed chief of Counterintelligence. As customary, he brought a few of his own people back with him; but the refurbished Counterintelligence section did not dawdle along in any customary manner. It changed drastically. Some would say, it mutated. Formerly a sober enterprise devoted simply to watching and countering the opposition’s more egregious gambits, and conducted in an almost bemused spirit by a clique of Ivy Leaguers, CI under Sparrow became a stronghold of zealotry, pathological vigilance, intellectual brilliance, personal eccentricity, and a complex exegetic view of international relations that would have done justice to a literary scholar at work on Finnegans Wake. For instance the Sino-Soviet rift, as seen from Claude Sparrow’s office, was a disinformation hoax. The autonomy of Yugoslavia was a hoax. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign was a hoax, and so was the persecution of Solzhenitsyn. Viktor Tronko of course was a hoax. Two of the young officers who followed Sparrow home from Vienna and helped set this tone, according to Bainton, were Melvin Pokorny and Roger Nye. Counterintelligence as run by Sparrow and these protégés very soon earned a mixed renown.
Mixed renown, that’s a safe statement, thinks Kessler. Typhoid Mary had a mixed renown and the cold Moscow winters, no doubt, are a hoax—though Napoleon and Hitler were fooled. Kessler never realized that Claude Sparrow in power had been quite so demented. Pokorny had always seemed sane as a fox.
Kessler culls two other tidbits from the Bainton article. Both of these are interesting enough to go into his notebook as well as his memory, though they evidently held no special importance for P. J. Bainton, who let them drop offhandedly in the space of a single paragraph. The first is merely a phrase, a name, and a seemingly frivolous one—“the Schnitzel Group.” Kessler guesses that for a Mel Pokorny coinage, the style is recognizable, and he wants to know more about it. The second fact of interest is a death: Fedorenko’s. How curious that Sparrow failed to mention this, the demise of his own favorite defector, happening as it did with such unfortunate timing.
The paragraph containing both these small gems appears near the end of a perfunctory summary of the
Viktor Tronko case. Bainton wrote: —makes another bizarre story all to itself. The Tronko interrogation dragged on for more than three years, adding no useful clues to the search for Dmitri. Sparrow had set one of his most experienced and hardheaded deputies, Pokorny, to the chore of this prolonged debriefing. Still, all that could be established beyond dispute was that (a) Viktor Tronko was a liar, and that (b) he claimed Dmitri did not exist. Tronko’s testimony about other aspects of KGB operations also differed materially from what Bogdan Fedorenko had said. A committee of analysts had been assigned to the Tronko case (they were known informally as the Schnitzel Group, because Tronko had defected in Vienna) and this group eventually recommended that Tronko and Fedorenko be brought together. Interviewing both Russians jointly in a confrontational context might resolve those discrepancies, it was thought. Before this idea could be acted on, though, Bogdan Fedorenko had died in an accident. He had been granted a CIA pension, after his own long debriefing, and resettled somewhere in New England under a fresh and well-guarded identity. On the morning of February 16, 1965, his body was found near Poughkeepsie. His car had gone off an icy road, landing upside down in a shallow, frozen lagoon. It wasn’t an accident and he wasn’t a Russian, Kessler thinks.
He wasn’t a Russian, Fedorenko. Not even an assimilated Muscovite. He was a Ukrainian. What else has Bainton gotten just slightly jumbled? No way to know. Kessler records the date, and Poughkeepsie, in his notes. He circles the entire paragraph on Barry’s file copy. An accident? Come on, P. J., you can’t really have believed that.
The lunch crowd has begun drifting into the Tabard. The waiter has now absolutely cut off Kessler’s supply of coffee, averting his eyes on each zooming trip by. All right all right, you can have your table. Time to try Barry again, anyway, and then over the river to meet Sparrow. Kessler sets out a large tip. Then he sits, stubborn goat that he is, long enough to reread that closing passage of the Bainton story:
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 28
